I ordered a remembrance stone today to remember the sacrifice of the crew of ED559. It will be placed at the new International Bomber Command Centre to be opened in Lincoln in September, 2015. 

I have received the Records of Service for Richard Curle - the skipper of ED559. They include his promotions, commissions and movements. I've added this detail to the research section. I am currently going through the record and deciphering the abbreviations used on them.

The unit code on ED559 was JA-D. I've seen that 100 Squadron at Waltham adopted HW. I've not been able to find out when the change was. I also saw on one site that JA was the unit code for 1652 HCU (Heavy Conversion Unit). So, to hopefully get some answers I posted a query on a forum.

UPDATE - I had a number of replies and added the detail about the JA code to the 100 Squadron page.

I added a link to the website for Lancaster LM658 today (in the Research & Links section). A remarkable website with in-depth history of the crew and aircraft. Hopefully, as time passes, people with an interest in ED559 with also contact me like they have with that website. A great job and definitely worth a visit.

A somewhat interesting article on the Bomber Command bases in the Midlands and north east of England - including RAF Station Grimsby. The limited info on Grimsby mentions some information I have not come across before. It says that in April 1945 the base was no longer deemed operational due to the runways being deemed unsafe. The data shows that 116 Lancasters and 48 Wellingtons were lost flying from Waltham.

One of the piece of documentation I'd like to see is the Casualty Report and MRES additions for ED559. I found this article about how the MRES unit of the RAF operated and how it worked both during and after the Second World War.  

The Ministry of Defence first released their casualty reports in 2013, with casualties from 1939 (there are approximately 20,500 files to be released, each file for a single aircraft). They are currently releasing the documents in date order so there may be a short wait until the records for 1943 are released.

The files at the National Archive are available here in AIR 81.

The old website at www.ed559.co.uk (that link now redirects here) had a very limited CMS. It only allowed 10 pages and was not optimised for mobile views. So I've shifted over to Weebly and also updated the url to lancaster-ed559.co.uk. I bought the domain for 10 years at a snip of a price at Easily.

The new site allows me to provide more background to the story of ED559 and include more of the research I have collected over the years. The site allowed a number of people to contact me regarding ED559 and I am ever hopeful that more will also find the site and contact me. I'm ever hopeful of getting photographs of the remaining three crew members.

I've still to visit Hendon (RAF Museum Library) or Kew (National Archives) to see what else I can learn. I'm sure there's more information to glean from those sources.

If you have found the site interesting please leave a comment.

Craig